


Ghosts in Asylum

by taiketsuenmi



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angel (Borderlands) Lives, Angel is older than you're probably expecting., Canon-Typical Violence, Family Bonding, Gen, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Identity Issues, Jack is a bad dad., Nothing like building your relationships through Handsome Jack trauma., Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Multiple, Past Child Abuse, Suicide Attempt, Tags May Change, Timothy ran off years ago., Welcome to trauma town!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-13
Updated: 2017-07-13
Packaged: 2018-11-14 04:16:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11200251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taiketsuenmi/pseuds/taiketsuenmi
Summary: If he got a second chance, she deserves a million.





	Ghosts in Asylum

**Author's Note:**

> Wow, okay, alright. 
> 
> I know I'm working on Plus One, my other Timothy fic (and I am so, so, so, so sorry it's been taking me so long to get to, a lot of stuff has come up), but I've been working on it solely for so long now I'm burning myself out, and stuff with family has come up.
> 
> And this idea has been festering in my brain for far too long for me to continue sitting on it.
> 
> Timothy and Angel are both good eggs who deserve the best, and what better way to give them that through a brother-sister relationship built through trauma and Jack's bullshit?

Is this what being dead is like?    
  
It’s dark. So very dark. And there’s nothing, just a void of crushing emptiness. She feels like she’s floating, weightless, but also being crushed and pinned down by something heavier than she could possibly begin to describe. When she opens her eyes (at least she thinks she’s opened her eyes) she sees nothing, and her body feels far too heavy to move, feels oddly numb, so she just lay there. Both floating aimlessly and being crushed all at once in this all encompassing darkness.

Somehow, it’s serene, calming. If this is what death is, she’ll gladly accept it.

She’s not sure how long she’s in this inky void, time seems nonexistent here. It could be second or hours, and she’d remain blissfully unaware. But time  _ does _ pass, and her mind wanders, there’s nothing to do but think. Somewhere in the recesses of her mind a small voice tells her she should feel lonely, feel trapped in this place. It’s nothing but another cage, and she’s alone. But she’s long since grown used to isolation, to boredom, to the feeling of being trapped.

At least it doesn’t  _ hurt. _

Oh, how she’s thankful for that. Her last moments were excruciating. The eridium pumping through her skull and into her very veins had destroyed her body, only to become her very life support. 

When the Vault Hunters with whom she pleaded to end it all had destroyed the first pump, it’d taken all the strength she’d had not to beg for them to stop. Never before had she felt her body scream in pain like that before. The second time, it was worse, but she’d steeled herself, she was resolute in her choice to end it all. For her rescuers, the whole thing probably felt like it’d gone by too quickly, but for her it had been so agonizingly slow. Her entirely body begged for the vile element, her head felt as if it were about to burst, she could taste copper in the back of her throat. 

What couldn’t have lasted more than ten minutes felt like an eternity. Jack dragged it out, of course he did. All those  _ things _ he said. All the words used to dissuade them from ending her misery.  Jack had begged for them to stop, tried to guilt them, said  _ he’d _ forgive  _ her _ . 

_ Asshole _ .

She was sure by the third pump, she’d pass out or just die in an instant. Yet somehow she remained conscious as her body hit the cold, familiar floor. The pain was soon overcome by numbness. Darkness ate away at her vision, then she found herself here.

Surrounded by silence, nothingness, and all the sensations of death washed away.

She doesn’t feel regret, but she wishes she’d gotten freedom she’d only dared to dream of. To be outside of the core. Even Pandora, with all it’s violence and horrors, would have been more welcoming than her cage of many years. 

There’s a nagging in her skull, she brushes it off as her chest clenches in sadness. She’d helped hurt so many people. She’d betrayed the people who had put their trust in her, and in the end they still granted her final wish. They ignored Jack’s words, his threats, his begging. She’s sure it’s not only because it was her wish, but she likes to imagine they also did it for her, as well. She’d like to think, in her final moments, they were doing it for her as her friends. 

The nagging sensation grows into a dull pained thrumming, and it pulls her away from her fantasies of the Vault Hunters, of her memories of her final moments. There’s a strange sound, and she tries to turn her head towards it, but her whole body feels like lead. It’s muffled, she can’t quite discern it, but it’s there and it’s too distracting to think.

So she focuses on it, trying to push back the thrumming that almost seems to be in tune with the soft sound as it spreads from the bead of her head to her temples, along her spine. The longer she listens, the clearer it becomes.

_ Beep...beep...beep. _

The sound continues. It’s incessant, it’s impossible to ignore, and she wishes it would stop. It’s only becoming clearer, sharper, louder. It feels like with every ring the pain in her body spreads just a little bit more.

She tries to locate it’s source but it’s all around her, echoing in what she’d assumed to be an endless space of nothing but pure darkness. Her serenity, her peace, it’s quickly fading, and she has to wonder if maybe she’d found herself in hell. If hell is just a black void with a small sound that will drive her mad for an eternity.

And as the pain spreads with the incessant sound, she seems to find her limbs. They’re heavy, they won’t move when she tells them to, but she can feel them with the pulsing ache running through her body.

Angel wants nothing more than to curl up into a small ball. The silence and the abyss had been so welcoming, all entirely alien sensations compared to this familiar dull throbbing running through her veins. 

Suddenly, another assault on her senses. Light. The darkness of Control Core Angel had been all she’d known for many years, this light is intense, bright, and not that familiar purple hue. She tries to shy away from it without any success.

She tries to fight it, but the longer she does, the more acutely aware of it she becomes. The brighter the light seems, the clearer the beeping, the sharper the pain. It’s not long until she succumbs to it, no longer able to deal with the swarm of sensations she’d been blissfully devoid of before. 

And finally, she opens her eyes.

At first nothing is focused, just a blur of light, sound, and sensation. Her body continues to feel heavy, but less like she’s being pinned down, and more like her body is filled with rocks. Sensation to her limbs returns first, no longer does she feels completely disembodied from herself. She twitches her fingers and they respond properly.

Her vision takes a few moments to clear, she doesn’t register her surroundings quite yet, there’s light coming in from somewhere that’s still too bright to her sensitive eyes. And the sound from before, which seemed to be coming from all directions was now directly to her left. It’s soften, but no less incessant and annoying as it had been before.

It takes far more effort than it should to turn her head towards the source of the sound, her body that feels so heavy also feels so incredibly  _ weak.  _ But her single uncovered eye lands on a machine and she stares at it numbly. There’s a small line that rises and falls with each beep, several wires protruding from it, she realizes, her gaze following them, are attached to her.

Realization slowly sinks in as she stares at them, and then at the screen. She’s been poked and prodded enough to know that it’s a heart monitor, the bottom of her stomach drops out from under her.

Her eyes widen, The beeping quickens. 

Her body screams in protest when she turns her head too fast. Suddenly she’s soaking in her surroundings, no matter how much her body fights against her. She pushes through the pain washing over her in waves. 

She’s in a small, unfamiliar room. The walls are completely bare, and there’s a single sad light bulb that sways from the ceiling. The light that made her head pound even more than it already did came from a window against the wall to her left, the glass is to dirty to see through and there’s a series of spiderweb cracks leading to a small, perfectly circular hole.

There’s a door, too. A single door, and her eyes fixate on it for what feels like far too long. Her mind is racing, and the pounding headache that she’s suffering does her no favors. How is she alive?  _ Why? _

No matter how hard she tries to claw at her brain for answers, all she can do is a drew a mere blank. It simply doesn’t make sense. She’d made her choice, she’d stood by her resolve to end it all, to finally leave the mortal coil. Anything to be free of her cage, of being trapped. Yet here she was, breathing, her body too frail and hurting to even care consider an escape. She’d wished for a better ending, but she’d been ready to die.

Suddenly that choice, one of the only choices she’d been able to make on her own, had been stripped from her. There’s no relief in the realization she’s still alive, in its stead she feels fear. She can only think of one person who could bring her back from the brink, the only person with the knowledge to keep her from death.    


A pitiful choke escapes her lips. Her body trembles, and it’s not from weakness or pain.    
  
No. No, that...can’t be.    
  
She tries to push herself up, and she fails miserably. Her arms feel too weak, she can’t even properly prop herself with her shoulders before she flops onto the uncomfortable mattress uselessly. Her throat burns when she tries to swallow, resists the urge to burst into tears.

Jack is the only one who could have done this, and if  _ course _ he would. She’s his only hope to opening the vault. She’s his catalyst. Her fearful gaze falls t the only door in the room an her entire body begins shaking. 

He’ll send her right back to the core, nothing will change, she’ll continue to live a life of imprisonment and servitude. No. No, she can’t let that happen. She needs to get away from here to escape. Even if it meant she’d die somewhere on Pandora, shot, torn apart, eaten, any of it would be better than being Jack’s tool.

She tries to get up again, this time with a bit more effort, and this time she manages to keep herself sitting upright with the help of the wall next to her. But it’s  _ so much _ effort even to do that. The monitor is beeping and blaring in time with her rapidly beating heart. 

She never remembers feeling this weak, she was certain she wasn’t. But it continues to take a strenuous amount of effort to move her own body, to eve try and untangle the scratchy blankets from her body.

A sharp pain shoots through her skull when she leans forward to try and unravel them from her legs and she clutches at the ports embedded in her skull ports. She tries to rub at them to sooth the pain, but a tugging persists, and an oncoming wave of dread is already at her heels. There’s something connected to them, her trembling fingers trace along the thin object and she leans back, gently tugging it into view.

She wants to scream, but all she manages it a pitiful little squeak. 

What appears to be some sort of IV is filled with a sickeningly familiar purple liquid. She stares at it for what feels like an eternity. Her eyes blur and become wet, and the trembling has turned into outright shaking. They can’t do this to her. Not again.  _ Please, daddy, not again.  _   
  
She whimpers and tugs softly at them, then another tug, this time no so gently, it makes her vision swim in protest. 

The monitor is going at an alarming rate. She tries to pull one more time.

But she’s stopped short, a large hand grasping her frail wrist.

This time, she manages to scream.

* * *

He’d seen the photo on his desk. It’d been years ago, but it’d been one detail that had stuck out in particular about Jack’s office. Everything about it was luxurious, larger than life, it’d even had a fire place. But among all the expensive decor, an average framed photo had sat on his desk among a mess of papers. He’d never been able to bring himself to ask about it, not until Nakayama had gotten it into his head that he could make Jack immortal via AI. But even then it’d been as indirect as asking Jack if he’d had any family, a wife, kids. Jack had shut it down, outright refused to answer.

In the end he’d been left with a conundrum. The image was of someone far too young to be anything other than a daughter or some sort of relative. But all he’d ever been able to do was guess.

When he abandoned his post as Jack’s double and fled to Pandora, curiosities like these became pointless, fall beyond the back burner, almost completely forgotten entirely. It’s the kind of information he figures he’ll never again have use for. 

Well, as it turns out, that isn’t how things work out. When Jack makes a Pandora-wide announcement, Timothy only has to listen to his voice for a few moments to feel the rage bubbling beneath them.  It made what he’d witnessed at the eye of Helios seem like nothing. Angry, screaming, violent Jack was normal. The boiling, seething rage was not. 

He declares the Vault Hunters he’d been trying to desperately to knock off were no longer wanted. Quite the opposite, in fact. If anyone other than Jack killed them, he’d make sure they suffered. Make sure they suffered for denying him vengeance for his daughter.

In that moment, he thinks back to the framed photo on Jack’s desk. He feels like the breath has been knocked out of his lungs, a twist of sadness wrenching at his gut. But it’s not for Jack. It’s for the face of the little girl in the frame with bright blue eyes and a broad smile. Jack was  a horrible person, and he got whatever was coming to him, but that girl in that picture, she didn't deserve to die because of her father. 

When the announcement is over he sits in silence for what feels like an eternity. 

It was stupid of him, everything in his mind screamed for him to not do it, but here he was, doing it anyways. With the ongoing battle of the Crimson raiders and Hyperion, and the destruction those fights left in their wake, all he had to do was follow its trail. The trail which leads him all the way to Thousand Cuts, and past there, to an imposing Hyperion outpost.

Well it would have been imposing, had the bodies of it’s workers and bots not littered the complex. The only sign of life in this place is himself as he trudges through corpses and debris.

It’s desolate and thoroughly cleaned out by the Vault Hunters that came before him. 

They’d torn the place to pieces. Not literally, of course, but the sheer number of bodies strewn about told a clear enough story of what happened there. It’s an uphill trek, each spot of violence more intense than the last. There’d been a good handful of constructors,  even formidable as they were, blown apart. 

It’s a war zone, fresh with death.  That’s what it is. And to say it’s an unnerving experience would be an understatement. The most surreal part of all this is none of it could be more than a few hours old.

All he hears is the sound his own breathing and his heavy footfall among the softly humming machines. The air feels heavy, and it’s difficult to breathe in. He’d heard things about these new Vault Hunters, the ones who’d survived one of Jack’s traps to do away with potential threats. That they were dangerous. But to see the destruction wrought in their wake only makes it that much more clear. 

It’s almost beautiful, and he’d have admired it far more had it not been as high as it was, or if the air hadn’t been filled with the choking smoke of destroyed robots.

It’d been a long walk to reach this place, he’d taken a few stops to snatch some security footage, to dig up some files about this place. Control Core Angel, it’s called. It housed, well,  _ Angel _ . Angel, he’s learned, is the name of Jack’s daughter. His daughter who was a siren, who’d been locked up for god knows how many years now.

He’s started to realize now that she hadn’t been some target knocked off just to get under Jack’s skin, she’d been vital to his plans this whole time. Guilt creeps along his spine. The vault on Elpis had been how he’d discovered the Warrior to begin with. If they’d just listened to that woman, Zarpedon, this could all have been avoided. 

But there’s nothing he could do about it now.

Even further above him there’s the BNK3R, a trashed mess, sparking and sputtering. A giant death machine that Timothy immediately likens to the RK5 they’d dealt with back on Elpis. He’s stopped short of that, however, at the Control Core’s entrance.

He’s watched the footage of what happened here, and he braces himself. There’s a chance this won’t work, he realizes, but against all better judgement, he steps forwards, allows himself to be scanned. And he half anticipated to be shot at. Instead there’s a soft sound of confirmation and a soft, friendly woman’s voice inquires for a password.

He lets out a soft sigh, and tugs at his scarf to turn off the tiny voice modulator at his throat.

This is stupid, not to mention dangerous. It won’t be long before someone picks up on him digging into such top secret files and into the security. He’d been hiding from Hyperion for almost five years. Why stop now? 

He’s certain there’s nothing to gain from this. 

But, y’know what? He’s come this far. Might as well do...whatever he feels like he should do here. 

He lets out a soft sigh and leans in, and mutters out the same words from the clip he’d snatched from one of the local security cameras. 

“I love you.” It feels heavy rolling off his tongue, he has to bite back a flinch at the sound of his own voice. The doors open, a woman’s automatic voice greets him, he doesn’t stop to listen to what it has to say. He knows he need to keep moving,  before he can start to have second thoughts. 

The core is dark, dimly lit, and accentuated by purple hues.  From the moment he steps in, his senses are assaulted by the acrid scent of some sort of chemical. He can almost taste it in the back of his throat, and he resists the urge to gag as he moves onward. In here it’s deathly silent, even the hum of machines seems to be muffled out entirely. In truth, it feels as if he’s walked into another world. He’s never seen anything quite like it. It bothers him greatly. This was where he’d kept his daughter? 

It’s small, and he especially realizes this when he steps into the main room. Which appears to be the  _ only _ room. This was seriously  _ all _ she had? Just this one room?

There’s smoke, and even more robot parts scattered about from a long tussle, given the sheer amount of debris. He readies himself to move further into the room when he finds himself hesitating, the room’s atmosphere slamming into him like a brick wall. 

It feels as if he’s stepping into a sacred place, he realizes suddenly, almost out of nowhere. It feels like a place nobody was meant to see, let alone be inside of. His gaze drifts along the walls, the ceiling, the floors. 

There are pools of violently glowing liquid pooling, dripping. His gaze drifts upwards towards what seem to be shattered vats. There are three puddles, so three vats, he can only presume. The chemical scent is much more aggressive here, and he puts two and two together, assuming the liquid was its source. 

He shakes his head softly and forced himself forwards, no matter how much it felt like he was invading. 

The soft drip-drip-dripping of whatever is pooling onto the flooring is the only sound that accompanies his breathing and the occasional sputter of dead or dying bots. The ones that seem to be mostly intact are clearly Loaders of some kind, but he doesn’t recognize their design, he’s not sure what to make of them, in fact. 

Just to be safe, he keeps his distance from any that seem to be intact.

His footsteps sound too loud in here which nothing else to drown them out. You could hear a pin fall in a place like this. He swears he can practically hear his own heartbeat. 

Moving towards the center of the room isn’t a difficult task, but he’s reluctant to do so. He’s entirely unsure of what to expect from this. Hell, he’s not even sure what he’s doing here, it’d been an impulse he’d felt so strongly he couldn’t help but act on it. 

But there’s nothing here. 

Nothing but trashed bots and--

_ W-woah! _

His feet meet something solid, but not quite as unforgiving as chunks of metal, and is causes him  to stumble forwards, nearly falling to his knees. Thankfully he catches himself before he can make a mess of himself face first into that chemical pooling at the floor. 

He releases a soft muffled grunt and tilts his head towards the side to catch of a glimpse of what he’d just stumbled over. All he needs is a glimpse to recognize it as a human form. His heart stops and he whips out his pistol, taking a few steps back from the unwanted guest. But the form doesn’t stir. Timothy watches it, but whoever it is, they aren’t Angel. Too big. And judging by the bullet wound straight through the back, and the blood pooling beneath them, he doubts they’re alive, either.

He lowers his weapon reluctantly, gaze drifting around the room once more, but when nothing moves, he steps forwards towards the body. He hesitates before he presses two bare fingers to the neck, but the stranger has gone cold by now, not a pulse to be found. Not surprising, but he felt he should check anyways. It’s too dark, and with the corpse face first on the floor like this, he can’t figure out who they are. Well, they’re certainly no Hyperion, that’s for sure. Not enough yellow.

One of the Vault Hunters, then…?

He releases a small breath of air and braces himself before flipping the unfortunate soul over.

The stranger is heavy, rigor mortis had already begun to set in. It had to have been at least two hours then. He supposes he should be glad he didn’t walk into Hyperion cleaning up this-

When he sees their face, he jumps.

So, it turns out maybe they weren’t a stranger after all.

He immediately recognizes the body as that of Roland, the man who’d helped aid Moxxi destroy the eye of Helios, and the guy who’d taken up the role as the leader of the Crimson Raiders and the resistance against Jack. 

He’d figured Roland would be on Jack’s shitlist, and he probably should have figured the man who lead the resistance would have been here, but…

Timothy hadn’t expected to find him dead, let alone just left to  _ rot. _

His fingers twitch reluctantly, and though the logical part of his mind tells him it’s hopeless, he checks for a pulse once more. Again, he finds nothing. He pulls away even more reluctantly than when he’d started, disbelief overwhelming him. It’s surreal. The man looks almost peaceful, like he’s asleep. Like he might just sit back up. Well, if you were willing to ignore the hole in his chest. And the blood on the floor, and caking his clothing.

Unlike the others, he’d never really held any grudges against Moxxi, Lilith, or Roland. Their attempt to murder Jack and the Vault Hunters, at the time, had been shocking and confusing sat best. He’d been hurt, at the very most. But over time, with Jack’s rise to power, Timothy quickly came to understand what Moxxi’s words back on Helios had meant.

Roland in particular had seemed the least eager to go through with the whole thing. They’d just been at the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong person. 

He didn’t know Roland particularly well. It wasn’t like they’d sat for hours  _ bonding _ , but one thing that stood out in particular. He’d been the only person during the whole debacle on Elpis, or in finding the vault, that’d asked what his name was. 

Which now seemed insignificant, but at the time, when he was still getting used to being Jack, it’d felt good to have someone care enough to ask. Even if he couldn’t have told him, no matter how much he may have wanted to.

Timothy stares, is silent, and he doesn’t move for the longest time.

It’s too quiet here, and now he’s not sure what he should do. Should he take Roland and...bury him? The former doppelganger shuffles uncomfortably. Roland’s a big guy, and Tim can only imagine how much he weighs. Did the Crimson Raiders know? If they didn’t he couldn’t just bury him. But he couldn’t leave him, either. Lord only knows what Jack would do once he got hold of Roland’s--

_ Hhk…! Hff, hff… _

Timothy whips out his pistol again.The sound, like hoarse, barely audible, and labored breathing isn’t coming from Roland. Timothy’s eyes dart upwards to the right, closed to the center of the room, and he catches spot of it. 

Another human form, it’s not moving. But the soft choking and wheezing combination continues for another second before it falls to silence again. He hates how loud his footsteps are when he moves towards the second human shape. From a distance he can already determine this one is fall smaller than Roland’s large physique. It doesn’t stir, even in the wake of Timothy’s advance.

Finally he draws in close, closing the gap. 

They’re  _ much _ smaller than Roland. It’s a woman, an incredibly frail woman is slouched against metal jutting out from the floor. She’s incredibly pale, eyes closed, sunken in. She looks deathly ill, and he has to get in alarmingly close to see that she’s breathing at all.

  
She, too, is familiar. Not as familiar as Roland, but he recognizes the hair and the face. Even if her hair looks like it’s been crudely chopped to make way for the ports embedded in her skull, her face is thin, and she has tattoos running across the left side of her body, which might have surprised him if he hadn’t read about her being a siren in the reports he’d lifted.

But it’s Angel. 

Now he’s really not sure what to do. He looks around the dark room frantically, half expecting someone to be there, but they’re alone. Just him, Angel, and Roland’s corpse. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting to find, but this...this  _ hadn’t _ been what he’d expected. Not by a long shot. 

His hands move to cup the girl’s shoulders, hesitating as a choked, pained breath passes her lips. She looks bad. Really bad. He scrambles around for ideas, but only comes to one conclusion. He can’t leave her here, that’s for damn sure. If she doesn’t die before someone comes to clean up, he can only imagine what would happen to her. The only option he has is to get her out of here and hope she makes it.

Or at the very least, she doesn’t die alone in her prison.   
  
When he picks her up, it’s alarming how light she is, how  _ frail _ she is. He feels like he might break her in half. You’re supposed to feel like that about babies, not full grown women. He carries her on his back, she’s limp, barely breathing, and what breathing she does do seems to be taking quite the effort.

He swears softly under his breath, shifting her weight against him and gives a glance back as he reaches the only exit and entrance. Roland’s body is still just laying there, cold and unmoving. It feels  _ wrong _ to leave him there. But when Angel goes into a series of violent coughs and wheezing, he’s reminded of the urgency of her state. Silently, he apologizes to the man’s body he’s leaving behind as he steps out of the core.

 

It takes too long for him to find a place that can house them, or more specifically, Angel. It takes several tries until he finally finds someplace with apt medical supplies, and she’s even worse for wear. 

He’d thought she’d looked bad in the core, but in the sunlight she looks like a ghost.

The drive had been horrible, several buzzards chasing after them until he finally managed to lose them in the Dust. And now they were holed up in some abandoned medical facility, god only knows who it’s residents were before them. He’s just hoping they don’t come back. It’s a miracle that Angel had survived this long, between the ride to get here and him needing to steal some supplies from Hyperion stock that’d been headed to the control core. Liquid eridium. He has an idea, and he can only hope it works as planned. He’s relieved to find an IV drip when he’s digging through a supply closet in the facility, tubes, and everything seems…. _ fairly _ clean. 

He hooks her up to it, eridium connected through an IV to the ports in Angel’s skull. There’s something sickening about sticking the IV in there, it makes him feel ill and guilty at the same time. But if his plan works, she won’t need it forever. 

She’s strong to have held out for this long, it’s a miracle she’s still alive at all. And he’d do his damndest to keep her that way. 

* * *

 

“Get away! L-let me go!” The grip on her wrist is firm, she wasn’t sure when he’d arrived or who he was, but needless to say, she was terrified. The scream she’d let out hasn’t deterred the intruder, not one bit. Panic spreads through her veins like a wildfire. She tries to pull herself free, but his grip is too strong and unrelenting. 

The stranger just moves in closer. 

Oh, god. What is happening? Was what she been through not enough? Did she have to suffer through more? What was this person going to  _ do to her? _

She turns her face away from him, a weak whimper passing her dried lips. The man’s hand, clasped against her wrist, twitches, and loosens. “ _ Please stop _ , you’re going to hurt yourself.”

The large hand around her wrist loosens even more until it’s no longer being held at all. She pulls it close to her chest and cradles it. The presence backs away, but it doesn’t leave completely, it’s still there at her side, and she reluctantly turns her head to face the stranger.

The stranger’s own face is hidden, and it does her panic no favors. They take another step back, puts their hands up in a non-threatening gesture, but she feels so weak, so vulnerable, they could easily overpower her, kill her. No, if they know who she is, what she’s  _ worth _ , they’ll do so much worse.

“I’m...glad you’re awake,” The stranger’s voice cuts through her thoughts like a hot knife in butter. It’s garbled, but the alteration doesn’t take away from the softness and genuine relief that floods their tone. “I wasn’t sure you’d make it. I’m glad you pulled through.” Her heart is pounding in her chest, it feels like it might burst right through her ribs. They have big hands, she notices, and she finds herself fixated on them. Especially as they fold them and rub their thumb thumb over their knuckles.

The stranger is fidgeting, shuffling their weight between their feet, watching her. She watches back, tense as a tightened spring. 

“Please...don’t pull those out. The, uh, the tubes. If you do, ah...you’ll get sick again.” Her stomach twists, the stumbling nervousness of his words alludes her as she’s reminded of what was being pumped into her.  _ Again. _ Her own smaller hands start to tremble. This is all so much, it’s  _ too  _ much. Being alive, in a place she didn’t know, with a stranger she doesn’t recognize. With eridium being pumped back into her, and so they must know. They  _ must _ . Why else would they be dumping it into her system again.

“H-hey, it’ll...it’ll be alright! Don’t...don’t cry. You’re okay, you’re safe!” The stranger’s voice cuts her thoughts off again, and this time they’ve taken a few steps forwards, a hand reaching out to her, but stopping short, fingers twitching in hesitation. It slowly lowers back to their side. “I’m not gonna hurt you.”

She has so many questions, there’s so much she doesn’t understand, and no matter how much the stranger tries to soothe her, it won’t erase the fact that they had her trapped here, whether they realized it or not. “Who are you? Where’s d- where’s Jack?”

No matter how much she tries, she can’t shake the fear from her voice when she says her father’s name. She wishes she could see the stranger’s face, read their expression, because watching them stand there in silence is almost unbearable. “You don’t trust me.”

She stares at them, wide eyed. She doesn’t move, she can barely breathe. Good thing it’s a statement, and not a question, because she knows she wouldn’t have been able to answer.

Their body seems to sag, as if even without words, they know her answer. They lets out a soft sigh, head falling. Without the stranger’s unseen gaze piercing into her, the silence is almost tolerable.

“You’re  _ safe _ , I mean it.” The words come out soft and sincere, but so had her father’s, so  _ many  _ times. 

She wishes she could believe the stranger, she wishes she could wash away the fear in her veins. But she knows better, they must know what she’s worth to Jack, there’s no way they could resist returning her. Why go out of the way to pump her with priceless eridium? What was there to gain? There were so many questions and not enough answers, and her head is swimming so much that she fails to notice her rescuer looking at her again, silent. Not until he cuts into her sight, large, calloused hands carefully running along the tubes filled with eridium at her side, and he speaks, his voice like a hot knife, her racing thoughts like butter.

“Trust me or not, if you try to run away like this, you’ll-” He pauses, but the underlying worry in his tone doesn’t escape her notice. “You won’t...make it far.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Phew!
> 
> Alright for, uh, this one? Like, this fic. I don't have a set ending, it's pretty rough around the edges. Who knows when or how or if it'll even be finished. But _dammit_ I want these two to be alive and happy.
> 
> Beta-read by [nyatsuma](http://archiveofourown.org/users/nyatsuma/profile)!
> 
> You can find me on tumblr at [taiketsuenmi](https://taiketsuenmi.tumblr.com/)


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